Formally neutral job requirements can perpetuate racial exclusion after open discrimination ends

Evidence

In the 1950s, Duke Power’s Dan River plant in North Carolina had publicly forced its Black workers into its lowest-paying jobs. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Duke Power adopted private discrimination—requiring high school diplomas and IQ tests—that produced the same outcome: Whites receiving the bulk of its high paying jobs. On March 8, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that Duke Power’s new requirements had no bearing on job performance. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1043

Categorization

• XREF: A perfect test case for Kendi’s causal inversion — policy (the new requirements) precedes and produces the discriminatory outcome, matching the reader’s ‘racist policy first’ model. — connects to: Finance work remains embodied and excludes workers marked by gender, race, or disability — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 187; Totalizing critical categories covertly become admission criteria that police inclusion — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 412
• SEED: Article angle: the Griggs decision as the moment courts first recognized that race-neutral screening mechanisms can be a disguise for ongoing racial hierarchy — the legal parallel to Kendi’s ‘racist policy behind antiracist rhetoric’.